


Unsaid Memories

by prototype_malice



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Family, Gen, Ghost Himbos, I Made Myself Cry, Oops, Sunset Curve, hurt with one tiny crumb of comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26609626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prototype_malice/pseuds/prototype_malice
Summary: His coat hangs by the door, waiting for him to come back in, to realize he left without it, to hug his mother again before he goes.
Relationships: Emily Patterson & Luke Patterson (Julie and The Phantoms), Luke Patterson & Mitch Patterson (Julie and The Phantoms)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 141





	Unsaid Memories

**Author's Note:**

> Oh no, it’s sad. Ah, well, spread the tears.

There is a door, in a home, somewhere people have forgotten about it. Or, at least, are trying to forget. It’s just cracked open, untouched for the last twenty-five years. One day, no one wants to speak aloud, no one wants to curse it, that door will swing wide, someone will open it, and come out and sit down for breakfast and talk about school and his friends and the girl he’d catch and give the moon and stars for this week.

There is an empty space, at the table, and no one can forget. Emily would know. She set a place there every day, three times a day, for five years before the denial wore off.

It hasn’t worn off, of course.

There are no recent photographs, on the mantelpiece. They have forgotten how to take them. They have never learned how to forget the empty space in the middle where he used to be.

Many things have changed in twenty-five years. Few things have moved.

His coat hangs by the door, waiting for him to come back in, to realize he left without it, to hug his mother again before he goes.

He must have been so cold.

There’s a pair of headphones holding onto the armchair in the living room, the old kind with the thin plastic piece and two tiny foam pads, terrible quality. He even tucked the cord in so it wouldn’t hang on the floor before he left.

The Bible hasn’t moved from the side table it’s been resting on. The cross has.

Emily prayed for just one second to hold him in her arms again, to kiss his forehead, to tell him she loved him and goodnight, even as he squirmed away. After that, she stopped praying.

They both hate the Fourth of July. The fireworks, the lights. Red, blue, red, blue. Like a child playing with a light switch. Like a siren when her boy is dead.

She went to the police after he’d been gone a week, because he’d never done that, never more than three days, and that was how her pleas were answered. Lights, as empty as the unmade bed she sees every time she passes by his room, hoping that one day he’ll be sitting there again, and the reason he won’t speak to her is that he can’t hear anything over the sound of his music.

They were best friends, a long time ago.

It was her arms around him when he had to get something off his chest, when he was five and he was hopelessly in love with a girl, when he was twelve and he was hopelessly in love with a boy. When he was thirteen and he hadn’t even started the school project due the next morning, he didn't have a childhood photo of himself worthy of sitting up there on the poster with the poorly-drawn tree. When he was fourteen and he decided he didn’t like crying himself to sleep. When he was sixteen and he didn’t know how to explain why Alex had stayed over every night for the past week.

Then he was seventeen, and they fought, and he ran away.

Hindsight is a cruel mistress sometimes.

Emily used to cry every time she saw anything he left around the house, or heard a bike on the street, or saw fireworks or flashing lights. Every time she heard a guitar. Every time she turned on the radio. Every time she saw a bouquet of flowers, like the ones the neighbors used to leave for them. But the neighbors moved away, and she saved her tears.

Now, from time to time, when Mitch had long since gone to bed, when the whole house was more somber, lit softly by the streetlamp across the road, she’d take down the jacket he left by the door and hold it for a while.

Mitch visited his grave sometimes. Emily could never bring herself to.

Luke liked to sit on the bench with him when his dad visited his grave, the old but surprisingly comfortable wooden one just across from the headstone. All it said was his name, the years, and “we miss you”.

“I miss you too,” he said sometimes, voice breaking, reaching out to touch his father’s hand.

But it just felt like a cold wind, and Mitch remembered what Christmastime used to feel like and put his hands in his pockets.

There was a note, in his room, if they could just remember to go in and find it. He’d scrawled it over two decades ago now, on a sticky note with a futzing pen.

He wrote it the night before he left, before the fight, when he was sitting around thinking about writing music, almost pinning down whatever idea he was chasing.

Most of the iterations of the line had been scribbled out. They weren’t what he meant.

“I miss this,” was all it had to say for itself, if only someone would pick it up and read it.

But Luke’s fingers drifted through the little scrap of yellowy paper, so he sat back on his old bed as his mother turned the radio on downstairs and the somber holiday tones of “Silent Night” floated up to him, watching how his tears always seemed to disappear before they hit the messy, untouched sheets.

Alex and Reggie poofed in, and he let them sit next to him and hug him, pretending he was five years old again and he had all the time in the world to look back and change his mind.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a thing! Don’t get used to it. You may also be interested in my JATP blog on Tumblr, @capncrunchybara, which I promise is much more lighthearted and fun than this. Usually.


End file.
